


lost boys

by waldorph



Series: 2012-2013 Winter Anthology [8]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 07:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/648207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What happened to the boy, when he jumped?"<br/>"He became a trained killer in Her Majesty's Secret Service," Q tells him, dryly, and Bond chuckles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lost boys

**Author's Note:**

> OUaT - for **blackonice** who wanted to know what happened to Rumplestiltskin's son. I am very sorry for the cross-over bit, but once I had the idea I really liked it, so this is what you get :)

"Tell me a story," 007 says. Q doesn't even look up from the phone he's trying to coax back to life. 

"No."

"Q. They'll come."

"They don't always. For you," Q points out. His glasses are cracked, and he's got a migraine building from forcing his eyes to focus in dim light.

It's something to appreciate about 007--he doesn't flinch at all. 007 is refreshingly at home with his own worth as determined by MI6. 

"No," Bond agrees. "But M will pitch a bloody fit if he has to replace his Quartermaster. Tell me a story."

"Once upon a time there was a very irritating agent who drove his quartermaster to homicide, and the quartermaster wasn't sorry a bit, the end," Q says, snippish. Bond laughs, and it paints his lips red. "Oh, Christ, stop that," Q says, patting himself down for something, anything, to wipe him clean. It's hopeless: they're both filthy, locked in a thankfully-broken industrial freezer in some abandoned something-or-other. 

In Kazakhstan, because Q _had_ to deliver this piece of tech to Bond personally because he'd been an idiot and used genetic encoding. Still. He'd delivered equipment to the other 00's. Bond just had a happy talent for making Q's life hell. 

"Once upon a time," Q says, soft, leaning back against the smooth metal wall, "there was a boy."

"Mm," Bond agrees, shifting to lay down. He's appropriated Q's lap for a headrest, but Q can't bring himself to fuss too heavily, what with Bond looking like death. Again, that is. 

"His father was a good man, but afraid of everything. The King of the land was waging war with the Ogres--"

"Was the boy the King's long-lost son?" Bond asks. 

"--and the boy's father had run from battle. So many died in the wars that there was no one to punish him, and he was a shrinking, cowardly thing. But he loved his wife, who was beautiful and wild, and he loved his son."

"What was the son's name?"

"Baelfire," Q invents. He had pretended that it was his name when he was young. Q had been abandoned by his parents somewhere in Scotland, and a wealthy couple adopted him as a playmate for their son. Mrs. Harding-Jones had been diagnosed with brain cancer shortly after Q's adoption was finalized, and all Q has ever wondered was how she managed that. Owen was just Q's age, and has always believed that they were brothers; won't hear otherwise, but Q knows differently. He was a member of the household, but he was never Patricia and Harold's son. He was that boy, the one they called Christopher, strangely formal every time. He was the boy who was supposed to fill the void the mother would leave in her son's life, and he doesn't think he ever managed to live the life they meant him to. 

He wasn't sad to leave it all behind when he joined MI6. Now it seems Christopher Harding-Jones is someone else, someone he puts on when he has to go see his father; when he has to pretend he's not Q. He wonders if Bond ever feels that way. 

Still, when they had been quite small, still running about the grounds, Q had always called himself Baelfire. Owen still calls him Bae. He never really was much of a Christopher. 

He really ought to ring Owen. Strange how being locked in an abandoned freezer makes one realize how isolated from one's family one is. 

"Baelfire's mother left them when he was young," Q continues, and Bond coughs wetly, his eyes closed like he's focusing on breathing. "She was captured by pirates, his father said. He'd gone to fetch her back, but he'd been no match for pirates, and Baelfire didn't have the heart to tell his father he knew his mother had run away with a pirate; that she had hated their life so much she'd left them both for just the promise of something more."

"This is a very bleak story," Bond tells him on a wheeze, and Q ignores him.

"And so Baelfire grew up, a coward's son, too clever by half but clever enough to know to hide it, and the Ogre Wars dragged on. Soon, it wasn't just every man, it was every child. The soldiers came to the village, and Baelfire thought he could fight. It was his duty, and the thought perhaps he would gain honor for himself in war, and rid himself of his father's name."

"What was his father's name?" Bond asks, and then shifts to squint at the door. He fumbles for his gun, and then he's leaning over Q, his hand steady as 003 pokes her head in. 

"Rumplestiltskin," Q says, exhaling in relief. "007, you're leaking all over me."

*

What he doesn't tell Bond is that the reason the story flows so easily is that Q has been telling that particular story for years, to himself, to Owen. He wrote it on paper and spun it into tales read by approving teachers. It never ends well, that story. He never really knew how to end it.

 

*

He doesn't think of their story-time, after. It had been a high-stress situation, and Bond had been managing Q's anxiety. It's quite simple. They go back to headquarters and Q clears up all of the messes his department made (little snags, things that would probably sort themselves out, if he's being honest, but he doesn't like being away and it makes him feel better to take it all in hand). 

Two days later Tanner stops by to suggest Q go home, and since Tanner's suggestions are never just that, Q shuts down and goes home. 

He has no food in his flat, and, sighing, he turns on Top Gear and then orders takeaway. Evidently man cannot subsist off of Earl Grey alone, no matter how diligently Q tries. 

He makes himself a cup and then watches Matt Smith tear about a track. It's mindless, but it's something. He needs to unwind. He spent a month staring at the red dot that was Bond, and then three days in a metal box with only Bond for company. 

No, no. He's not going to think about that because then he's going to get his laptop and do some serious damage, and the new M isn't quite settled enough to take a call from the PM asking if one of his agents has been into the secure databases (it's only fun if it makes someone nervous, the late M had understood that). He settles back down in front of the telly until the delivery man buzzes.

"You need to eat better," Bond tells him, holding Q's order of General Tso's and Chow Mein. Q contemplates slamming the door in his face, but he's hungry now that he's smelled it, and Bond clearly knows it. Insufferable ass.

"Bond," he says, stepping back. "I hope you paid the man, and I'm not going to get banned from ordering from that place--they do the best General Tso's around and if their delivery man is concussed they will probably take some offense."

Bond just quirks an eyebrow and smirks, and Q rolls his eyes and says, "I'm not sharing." 

He could yell about the sanctity of his home being invaded, about how breathtakingly unprofessional and inappropriate this is, but Bond would just ignore him. Q hates 00's. He should never have taken the job, despite the attractive benefit package.

"Was there something you needed?" he asks. 

"How did that story end?" Bond asks, swanning into the place and settling on Q's couch. Q glares at the back of his head.

"What?" Q demands, momentarily at a loss.

"The story of Rumplestiltskin's son. I thought Rumplestiltskin was a little elf with a mean streak." 

"He was a man, in this story. A coward who was tricked into becoming a being of infinite power."

"He had to be tricked into it?" 

"He wasn't," Q allows, sitting down next to Bond, "very clever. They called it 'The Dark One' and whomever had the dagger which bore the Dark One's true name could control it."

Bond makes a sound, a little pained but mostly interrogative. 

"The old man who was the Dark One told Rumplestiltskin that he had to stab the Dark One and it would save Bae," Q says, curling his fingers into fists as though that will stop the trembling.

"Who was going to war."

"Precisely." Never let it be said that Bond wasn't adept at keeping up while bleeding out. It was really too bad that they couldn't scan brains after death, because he was certain that Bond's was perfectly organized and would be extremely helpful.

"So he did."

"Yes."

"And?"

"And the old man and the Dark One were the same, and it was all a bit suicide-via-idiot. Rumplestiltskin was trapped in the old man's place, but he did, at least, bury the dagger so no one could ever hold it and command him."

"Not so stupid."

"No," Q agrees, soft. He feels a strange sort of melancholy, the way he had when he'd been very small. 

"What happened then?"

"You know the saying about power and corruption." 

"I've heard something about it," Bond agrees, stealing Q's chicken. Q stabs him with one of his chopsticks. Hard.

"Well." 

"Took over the world, did he?"

"No," Q laughs, because Rumplestiltskin was a man with limited ambition, really. "It wasn't all terrible. He ended the war, brokered peace. But he'd been a very small man his whole life, and people had been terrible and cruel to him for a long time. Revenge seemed...logical." Q doesn't want to talk about this anymore. There's a difference between putting it on paper, sterile black on white, to be read for a grade, to saying it all aloud. It feels more real, this way.

"What about the son?" 

"He tried to save his father before it was too late and the man was gone and only the Dark One remained. The Blue Fairy helped, gave him a bean that would lead to another realm where magic didn't exist. Rumplestiltskin agreed, but even as a being with such power, he was a coward. So when it came time to go, Rumplestiltskin refused to jump."

"Bastard."

"Mm."

"What happened to the boy, when he jumped?"

"He became a trained killer in Her Majesty's Secret Service," Q tells him, dryly, and Bond chuckles. 

It's easy, the two of them sharing space. Easy in a way it oughtn't be, given that this is 007, and he is Q.

But Q falls asleep easily enough, and dreams of fairy tales. It's nothing new, feeling the Blue Fairy's last act of kindness returning him to infancy so he wouldn't remember his betrayal, imagining he was the son of the Dark One. He had a lot of fantasies like that as a child, a baby in a dumpster. The psychiatrists Owen's parents had hired said it was a combination of overactive imagination and high intelligence. 

*

"No," Q says into his headset, glancing at the monitor before looking back down at the gun in his hands. "Your other left."

"Is my right," Bond grunts. 

"Nonsense," Q admonishes. "I've been giving it thought," he says, once he's seated the microchip just under the trigger of this new gun he's working on. 006 likes to let himself get disarmed: Q intends to give him a gun that will turn into a bomb when in the (literally) wrong hands. 

"What?" Bond asks, and Q smiles, imagining the disgusted face Bond is making at the sewer around him. Q did tell him to wait, but no, this is 007. He'll have none of that waiting business.

"Who you would be in a fairytale."

"If you tell me I'm the beast, Q--" 

"No, you're far too pretty to be the Beast," Q dismisses, and several of his engineers slant looks over at him, incredulous. "Though he was quite good-looking at the end. You lack the hair, though."

"Q." 007 is _livid_ , and Q is thoroughly entertained. Bond is literally in shit because he would not wait for Q. This is possibly the greatest day.

"Yes. Right. No, I've decided that you would be Peter Pan."

"Oh, that's better."

"No, think about it. Dogged determination not to grow up: can't be killed--"

"Fairy chiming in my ear."

"Ha ha. Admit it, it's a good one." 

Bond does no such thing, but that's alright. Q doesn't need Bond to validate him.

*

The depressing thing about having family is that sometimes one is forced to do something other than one's job.

Still, he can't ever manage to be irritated about it for very long, not in the face of Owen's bright smile, genuinely pleased to see him. 

"You seem well," Owen says as they're finishing, bickering over who should pay. Owen takes advantage of Q's momentary startle to hand their waitress his credit card. Sneaky bastard, why is Q's life full of them? "Better than you have been, lately. Less...tight, around the eyes."

"Yes, well. I've taken up writing children's stories," Q says. 

"You were good at those," Owen laughs, lifting his cup and crunching the ice at the bottom. Q pulls a face at him at the sound. He spent summers yelling at Owen to stop chewing ice in his ear while he was trying to read: some things never change. 

"So you're seeing someone, then," Owen says a bit later as they walk down the street. Q stares at him.

"No." Q hasn't seen anyone for years--no one he's kept longer than a couple hours, anyway.

"Chris!" 

It takes Q far longer than it should to turn around, he'll admit, but it's the wrong voice using the wrong name, and when Bond jogs towards them looking like something out of GQ, Q doesn't have to be looking at Owen to know his grin has gone patronizing. 

"James," Q says, trying to convey to Bond that he is going to kill him shortly. 

"I thought it was you, oh, but sorry, you're--"

"I'm Owen, the brother," Owen says, extending a hand, beaming between them. "And you're--"

"No one of consequence," Q says, and Bond looks honest-to-God _hurt_ by that, and Q is developing a migraine.

"Bae!" Owen says, disapproving and a little surprised that Q would treat his boyfriend so poorly, and Q is going to murder Bond by _hand_ for this.

"Right, sorry. James this is Owen, Owen, this is my--this is James." 

And damn it, he knows exactly how that sounded without needing to look at either of them, so he glances away and catches the glint of sunlight off a scope on the building across the street. 

Ah. 

Owen is telling Bond that he works in finance, and Bond is making impressed noises and Q pulls out his phone, hacking the CCTV to sweep the area. 

Bond is herding them, puts his hand on the small of Q's back to direct him while Q keeps a black sedan with tinted windows caught in an unexpected traffic snarl. There's someone else in the CCTV, and Q finds he doesn't like the idea that Owen would get caught up in this. 

He tries to keep his lives very separate. This is uncomfortably messy. 

"Oh," he says, when they've turned another corner, and then looks at Bond. "I forgot my umbrella at the restaurant, could you--?"

"Bae, he doesn't have to--" Owen begins, but Bond nods, understanding the implicit _fix this_. 

If Q was at his desk, he might be able to do a bit more, but this is why MI6 still has 00's. Sometimes you need that human touch. 

*

Owen is pleased, and entirely wrong. He's so happy Q has found someone, even if he's quite a bit older. They fit so well together, isn't it lovely? They must come around for Christmas, Sarah will be so glad for him, and it's been too long since they had a holiday as a family. 

Q is not pleased. He's absolutely not bringing 007 to his brother and sister-in-law's home under the guise of being slavishly in love. This is not a film, for Christ's sake, it's his _life_.

"They weren't targeting you," M says when Q comes to his office after seeing Owen safely back to work. Q had stopped to get a cup of tea, and then gone to M. M must have been expecting him, because Q was ushered straight through. Q sips his tea, waiting. This is nothing he doesn't know: he's taken great pains to be absolutely invisible. "And it's been handled." 

"Excellent," Q says. "Is this something I need to be concerned about us not picking up on?"

"We did," M says. "You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong side, and 007 made the call to extricate you and your brother." 

Which means they had told 007 to handle the situation, and 007 had overreached his orders as usual. Still, it's good to know his people aren't failing him, and he's feeling very fond of them all has he pushes open the door to the lab.

He's far less pleased to see Bond at his desk. "Did you at least manage to hold onto your gun?" he asks.

"Do you even know how to handle yourself in a gunfight?"

Q stares at him, incredulous. "While I do not have 00 status, I did, in fact, pass my tests. Something which, of the two of us, I am alone in." 

"But you don't carry."

"No, 007, I do not. I have a phone, it's quite enough." 

"Until you're--"

"007, let me make this very clear: if I am ever threatened or caught out and MI6 leaves me alone, it will be the very last thing this institution does. M is perfectly aware of it." 

Bond looks at him, and then the corner of his mouth tilts up, his expression shifting from blank-faced killer to amused human in a second. It's irritating, how he does that. It's as though he flips a switch.

"He calls you Bae?" he asks, leaning casually against the desk. 

"We're not discussing this. We do not have casual conversations." 

It's been months since that night in Q's flat, and Q had woken on his sofa alone, the afghan draped over him carefully and the TV off. They hadn't spoken of it, and Q has written it off as Bond being completely mad. 

"Hm," Bond says, and then saunters out. 

Q doesn't let it bother him: he has an Iranian crawler to muddle through. 

*

Bond doesn't show up at Owen's Christmas party, and Owen looks so sad that Q finds himself lying, and saying he'd been called away to work.

He goes into work after the party is over, and 007 is there, making his way to medical. 

"I suppose I ought to see the other guy?" Q asks, falling into step with him. 

"He's in the morgue," Bond says, grinning at him, and Q wasn't wrong about the Peter Pan comparison: sometimes Bond is just like a child. It makes him impossible: his malice and violence are wrapped in childlike pleasure at the destruction when he's not wrapped up in his own guilt. 

It's strange--since Skyfall Bond smiles a bit more. Like being dead and risen agrees with him.

Q follows him to medical, where the doctor sighs and starts stitching up the jagged laceration on Bond's bicep.

"Tell me another story," Bond says, and Q rolls his eyes and adjusts his glasses, and tells him about a wicked queen who stole the hearts from men and kept them locked away in a vault. 

He finishes the story of the huntsman kept captive by the Queen as her lover, and then looks at Bond, who's pulling on a new shirt. It doesn't fit him: not tailored. Bond is something of a clothes slut. Clothes, cars, and guns. Really, he's absolutely precious.

*

"What really happened to the boy?" Bond asks one night, when he's commandeered Q's sofa and is watching Miranda Hart fret over some woman's pregnancy. Q can't tell if Bond actually enjoys these shows or if he's just fucking with Q. It's a toss-up, probably. 

"Which boy?" Q asks, trying to think if Bond's last job had put him in the way of children (it's in Bond's file _not_ to do that. If MI6 went in for things like red ink and underlining, that clause would have all of the bells and whistles). 

"Rumplestiltskin's son." 

"He was better off until his sofa was hijacked."

Bond smirks, pleased with the world, and at the end of the night he presses a kiss to Q's lips before leaving.

Fairytales as a seduction technique. No one can say Bond isn't innovative.

*

The thing is, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that some fantasy Q invented as an orphan boy has stuck with him, and it doesn't matter that Bond is an utter slut for any kind of attention shown him. 

Q isn't the princess who believes her prince will always find her, and Bond isn't the shepherd-turned-prince who believes he'll always find her.

Q isn't the wide-eyed boy who flushes, shocked, when Bond presses bruises into his skin as he fucks into him, and Bond isn't the hardened rake who just needs a firm, loving hand. 

At the end of the day, they're Q and 007, and even though Q knows Bond fancies he'd be a villain in the world Q's constructed, Q knows better. 

Bond would be a no one. A black knight whose heart had been removed, not unlike who he is now. There are no tales about men like Bond, because there is no lesson to teach children which ends, "so be very cruel, and you will be very successful." 

But Q thinks that if Bond had been a black knight, Q would have liked to have been the one who kept his heart in a box, locked away and safe. He wonders if Bond would have given it freely, or if Q would have stolen it. 

He thinks that if he and Bond lived in that fairytale world, they wouldn't have had to worry about Rumpelstiltskin or a wicked queen. 

Just Baelfire and his wolf.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Blanket Permission:** go ahead and translate, make podfic, rework the fic, or do whatever other transformative work you can think of. If the work is hosted on another site, drop me a comment or email and I'll put a link in the story notes!
> 
> [twitter:](https://twitter.com/waldorph) for unfiltered me || [tumblr:](http://waldorph.tumblr.com/) less about me, more about the pretty gifsets and art


End file.
